I am very paranoid when on the phone. I always listen for the little clicks and clacks. I have nothing to hide but my parents think that blogging will draw unnecessary attention to me. Perhaps they are right. I know that when I speak to Manish on the phone about some blog-related matter I should not be using the word “mutiny.” After a while though you just become complacent and let words like “mutiny” and phrases like “overthrow the establishment” drip from your mouth like honey into a cup of green tea. I’ve also been using a calling card (from what may be a shady NSA front company) to call my parents who are vacationing in India. I should think twice about what I say because the big news of the day is that the New York Times is confirming what many of us already suspected. Big Brother might be listening to your mutinous conversations. He can hear you.

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible “dirty numbers” linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval represents a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

“This is really a sea change,” said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. “It’s almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches.”

Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation’s legality and oversight.

Whispers of the NSA’s Echelon have long circulated in television and literature. Like Area 51 it’s the secret everyone knows about. There exists a giant computer network that listens to the communications of our enemies abroad:

ECHELON is a term associated with a global network of computers that automatically search through millions of intercepted messages for pre-programmed keywords or fax, telex and e-mail addresses. Every word of every message in the frequencies and channels selected at a station is automatically searched. The processors in the network are known as the ECHELON Dictionaries. ECHELON connects all these computers and allows the individual stations to function as distributed elements an integrated system. An ECHELON station’s Dictionary contains not only its parent agency’s chosen keywords, but also lists for each of the other four agencies in the UKUSA system [NSA, GCHQ, DSD, GCSB and CSE] [Link]

The real rub is that our government is reportedly listening to conversations in which one party is in the U.S. and the second one abroad. Unless I am overlooking something obvious, to me this implies that this aspect of the “War on Terror” is being waged mostly against minority populations instead of home-grown terrorists. Timothy McVeigh types generally won’t be making phone calls abroad prior to a terrorist attack. Luckily this revelation came on the eve of a vote in the Senate to re-new the Patriot Act. The bill promptly fell to defeat when the administration’s secret (and probably illegal) activities were revealed.

During Friday’s session, senators held up copies of the New York Times report as a sign that the government could not be trusted with all the broad powers laid out in the Patriot Act.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York, said he had been unsure the night before how he would vote. “Today’s revelation that the government listened in on thousands of phone conversations without getting a warrant is shocking and has greatly influenced my vote,” he said. “Today’s revelation makes it very clear that we have to be very careful. Very careful.”

Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wisconsin, who voted against the original Patriot Act but lead efforts to filibuster the current version, said, “I can’t imagine a more shocking example of an abuse of power…” [Link]

I feel though that our government should have the power to listen in on the conversations of U.S. residents in order to prevent a terrorist attack. Actually, they already do:

…there is already a special court that issues national-security-related subpoenas and has a much lower threshold for evidence than regular courts. That court has rarely—if ever—turned down a subpoena request. [Link]

So even though the Bush administration could have gone to a puppet court to legally do what they wanted to, they passed on the option. I wonder if that is any indication as to the quality of their “evidence.” All I know is that I will be much more careful about using key words on the phone, and will no longer be accepting calls from my activist friends.